Applied Biosystems has partnered with the Translational Genomics Research Institute to accelerate research into complex diseases and medical conditions.
As part of this alliance, a team of scientists from TGen and Applied Biosystems will employ the Solid 3 System, Applied Biosystems's genomic analysis platform, to sequence DNA from thousands of patients with a variety of diseases.
The goal of this research is to translate scientific discoveries at the genetic level into knowledge about the underlying causes of disease: this may ultimately be used to create clinical diagnosis tools.
The alliance enables TGen researchers to apply best-of-breed sequencing technology across a spectrum of research efforts that focus on developing a more personalised approach to medicine.
This approach, known as personalised medicine, may shift the focus from treating diseases based on symptoms, to therapy specific to an individual's genetic make up.
Among the goals of this project is to advance the promise of personalised medicine by reducing the cost of genome sequencing to make it a routine diagnostic tool in medical care.
The scientists will use five Solid 3 Systems to build a sequencing pipeline in connection with patient-centric, medically directed re-sequencing on a cross-section of patient samples.
The results are expected to help individuals with cancer, autoimmune and neurological disorders.
The alliance will also involve the development of a bioinformatics analysis and visualisation pipeline for the Solid platform.
This will result in software tools that ease the analytical challenges associated with analysing data generated by human disease and cancer genomics applications of next generation sequencing.
Scientists from both organisations will perform six different projects that will characterise genetic and molecular changes occurring within clinical cohorts for each disease.
The scientists at TGen chose the Solid technology for this project because of its scalability, unparalleled throughput and unmatched data accuracy.
These attributes make the Solid System suited for translational research of complex diseases by enabling the detection of single nucleotide polymorphisms and other structural variation across the genome in many samples.
